All posts by: Sarah Hansen, M.S. '15

UMBC biologist Phyllis Robinson recognized for research, advocacy, and mentorship

UMBC has named Phyllis Robinson, professor of biological sciences, the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Chair of Biological Sciences. The three-year appointment honors Robinson for her exceptional contributions to her research field, commitment to addressing gender equity issues in STEM fields, and dedication to mentoring students and faculty at all levels.

Robinson is an international leader in the field of vision science. She sees the visual system as “a wonderful way to look at signaling in biological systems and an entrée into the nervous system and neurobiology.”

Robinson examines the visual system from “molecules to behavior,” and her lab incorporates techniques from biochemistry, molecular biology, and physiology. She has published dozens of peer-reviewed papers, presented her work all over the world, and garnered millions of dollars of research support from the NIH and other sources.

Tireless advocate

Robinson is also a tireless advocate for women and other underrepresented people in STEM. In 2000, in response to an MIT report on resource discrepancies between men and women in STEM, she co-founded UMBC’s Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) group. What started as a monthly gathering for women faculty to connect has grown into a rich mentoring network. WISE now offers workshops to faculty members and graduate students on topics from leadership development to eating healthfully on a hectic schedule.

The WISE group tapped into a need on campus and spurred further efforts to support women in STEM. Robinson served as co-PI on the UMBC NSF ADVANCE Grant, which is nationally recognized as a model for institutional transformation programs. Between its inception in 2003 and 2018, the number of tenured and tenure-track women faculty members in STEM disciplines at UMBC increased 60 percent, from 30 to 48, and the number of women who are full professors more than doubled.

Patrice McDermott, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, and Phyllis Robinson.

Because of Robinson’s efforts, “I am now the proud colleague of five highly-qualified junior women faculty,” says Rachel Brewster, professor of biological sciences. “Their presence in the department is a source of inspiration for our large female undergraduate and graduate population.”

Marie desJardins is now dean of the College of Organizational, Computational, and Information Sciences at Simmons College and was previously a professor of computer science at UMBC. She comments that Robinson’s invitation to join an ADVANCE leadership cohort “helped me to cement my goals as an academic leader.”

“As a university, we’re committed to supporting everybody,” Robinson says. “We’re not perfect, but there is a commitment to underrepresented minorities and women in STEM.”

Robinson was honored by the UMBC President’s Commission on Women in 2012 and recently received the 2018 Marilyn E. Demorest Faculty Advancement Award for her advocacy work at UMBC.

Science and social justice

Robinson is a dedicated mentor to dozens of graduate and undergraduate students from all backgrounds. In 2017, she succeeded Lasse Lindahl, professor of biological sciences, as program director of MARC*USTAR at UMBC—an NIH-funded undergraduate scholars program that connects students from groups underrepresented in the biomedical sciences with valuable research opportunities. UMBC’s program has already supported over 100 UMBC alumni who have earned Ph.D. or M.D./Ph.D. degrees.

Like her advocacy for diverse STEM faculty, Robinson’s work as a mentor for students goes back decades. She was previously honored for excellence in mentoring by the University System of Maryland Board of Regents in 2002 and by the Leadership Alliance in 2006.

Phyllis Robinson and the members of her lab.

At UMBC, “I’ve been able to do my science and also put energy into the social justice aspects of the world that are important to me,” Robinson says. “One doesn’t exclude the other.”

Dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences William LaCourse is grateful for Robinson’s efforts over the course of her career at UMBC. “Professor Robinson’s professionalism is equally matched by her passion for research, her gift for mentoring, and her compassion for others,” he says. “Over the past 26 years, she has provided exceptional service to the university through her tireless leadership and advocacy for others.”

Robinson reflects that the UMBC environment helped make it all possible. “I’ve enjoyed working at UMBC,” she says, “because as a fairly young university, if you put energy into something you can really have an effect here.” Robinson certainly has.

Banner image: Phyllis Robinson speaks at the 2018 Presidential Faculty Staff Awards, where she received the Marilyn E. Demorest Faculty Advancement Award. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s Aaron Smith works toward developing new antibiotic targets with NIH grant

With antibiotic resistance on the rise, it’s critical that researchers develop new ways to stop bacteria that cause diseases like food poisoning, sepsis, pneumonia, or tuberculosis. “We have to think about more strategic and clever ways of attacking bugs,” says Aaron Smith, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UMBC. “One way is to work on identifying and characterizing additional targets that we can consider for antibiotic development.”

Potential new targets include the systems that allow bacteria to grow and to reproduce. This includes systems bacteria use regularly to take up essential nutrients from their surroundings, such as the soil or an animal host.

Smith’s lab focuses on how biological systems take up and process iron, and he’s just received a two-year grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, a division of the National Institutes of Health, to explore how the bacterium Porphyromonas gingivalis takes up reduced iron, a specific form of the element. P. gingivalis is responsible for gingivitis, a gum disease and one of the most common infections worldwide.

Virtually no living thing can survive without iron: It’s critical for DNA synthesis and other metabolic processes that “help drive the chemistry and survival on our planet,” Smith says. Plus, the way bacteria take up reduced iron is very similar across all species—unravel the way one species does it, and you’re much closer to understanding them all.

Students and Aaron Smith working in a chemistry lab.

Bound for discovery

Virtually all bacteria use something called the Feo system to take up iron. In many bacteria, it consists of three proteins: FeoA, FeoB, and FeoC. FeoA and FeoC play supporting roles, while FeoB is the “gatekeeper that sits in the cell membrane and transports reduced iron to the inside of the cell,” explains Smith. However, there is evidence that without FeoA, FeoB can’t do its job nearly as well.

“Despite the fact that it’s a small protein, FeoA appears to have a really big role in iron uptake,” Smith says. “We’re interested in understanding how FeoA and FeoB are interplaying with one another, and how that might drive or regulate the reduced iron uptake process. If we can understand how that process works, then we can think about ways to disrupt that process.” That could lead the way to new antibiotics.

In the last six months, the lab made a breakthrough by solving the atomic structure of the FeoA protein in a different bacterium. The structure reveals a strong candidate for the exact site on the FeoA protein where it binds to FeoB. Previous research has indicated where the binding site is on FeoB. One of the goals of the new grant is to confirm these binding sites in P. gingivalis.

Creative techniques

Smith and his team will use crystallography, a technique that freezes compounds in time, allowing researchers to determine and examine their unique molecular structure. Through this technique, they’ll examine FeoA and FeoB at different stages of their reaction with one another. “We think that will reveal the atomic level interactions,” Smith explains. “Ideally, we’d like to see the entire process at atomic-level resolution.”

Smith is hoping the crystallography work will identify which amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) in FeoA are critical for its proper interaction with FeoB. To further test those ideas, they’ll genetically modify the bacterium at the indicated amino acids and see if it can still survive on reduced iron. “Those results could give us a really strong insight as to whether iron uptake might be a viable target for disruption,” Smith says.

The lab also plans to collaborate with Robert Ernst, professor of microbial pathogenesis at the Maryland School of Dentistry in Baltimore. The grant will support training for graduate students in the Chemistry-Biology Interface program, a joint venture between UMBC and the University of Maryland, Baltimore funded by the NIH.

Smith’s students will spend time in Ernst’s lab to learn techniques for the genetic modification experiments. “It really expands the scope of what we can test,” Smith says. “Instead of it just being of intellectual interest to biochemists, it adds in a level of biology that’s really essential.”

The results of the work will be broadly applicable to a wide range of bacteria, but studying P. gingivalis specifically has opened Smith’s eyes to the importance of oral health.“When you look at how your oral health is linked to lifelong health,” and conditions from stomach ulcers to cardiovascular disease, “it’s quite incredible,” Smith says. “Oral health really trickles down into every aspect of your life.”

Banner image: Aaron Smith in his lab. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s Amy Lien helps NASA unravel the mystery of an unusual blast from across the universe

A brief and unusual flash spotted on June 16, 2018 has puzzled astronomers and astrophysicists across the globe. The event, called AT2018cow and nicknamed “the Cow,” defies many of the models scientists use to explain similar outbursts, prompting multiple hypotheses about its source.

Amy Lien, an assistant research scientist in UMBC’s Center for Space Sciences Technology, is on a team of researchers working with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to develop one theory about the blast’s source. Their model describes a monster black hole shredding a passing star.

“We’ve never seen anything exactly like the Cow,” Lien says, “which is very exciting.”

Spotting the Cow

The Cow occurred in the vicinity of a star-forming galaxy known as CGCG 137-068, located in the constellation Hercules, about 200 million light-years away. That’s 2,000 times the distance from one edge of the Milky Way galaxy to the other.

The Cow was first observed by a ground-based telescope in Hawaii, and the initial observations interpreted it as a potential supernova. Astronomers are quite interested in supernovae, so other telescopes around the world were quickly pointed in its direction to learn more. All three instruments on the Swift Observatory observed the patch of sky where the Cow was spotted for at least 60 days after the initial sighting.

Lien and four other research teams shared their groups’ different interpretations during a panel discussion on January 10 at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Seattle.

Explosions in the sky

“Explosions in the sky happen all the time,” explains Lien, “so at the beginning people didn’t think this was anything different.” But after more observations came in from Swift and elsewhere, the scientists started to think, “This one looks very weird,” Lien remembers. “It doesn’t match well with anything we know.”

The explanation Lien’s team settled on is an event called a tidal disruption. “When a star gets too close to a black hole, it will get stretched and torn apart by the tidal force in a similar way that causes tides on Earth,” explains Lien. However, because the black hole has an extremely strong gravitational force, instead of just an ebbing tide, “you see the whole star get stretched and shredded,” she says.

Lien and her colleagues think the shredded star was a white dwarf: a hot, roughly Earth-sized object that represents the final state of stars like our Sun. They also calculated that the black hole’s mass ranges from 100,000 to a million times the Sun’s. It’s unusual to see black holes of this scale outside the center of a galaxy, but it’s possible the Cow occurred in a nearby satellite galaxy or a globular star cluster, which tend to contain a higher proportion of white dwarfs than average galaxies.

When the star was torn apart, the Swift team theorizes, its debris formed a hot, opaque sphere as it was sucked into the black hole. Because the sphere is so dense, it expands very quickly (at nearly 10 percent the speed of light) and creates a “cocoon” layer around itself, which then flies away at extremely high speed.

The whole process of tearing, compacting, and flying away “generates a lot of energy,” says Lien, “and some of it is released as light, almost like a huge light bulb.” That could explain the light coming from the Cow.

Exciting unknowns

Swift, which orbits Earth about 340 miles above the surface, observed the Cow with all three of its instruments, which detect UV rays, x-rays, and gamma rays. Data from these instruments helped the scientists determine the temperature of the Cow, which is approximately four times the temperature of the Sun and consistent with a tidal disruption.

The rate at which the Cow’s brightness decreased during the observation period and its extremely high temperature added to the team’s convictions. But there are still elements that are less likely based on their hypothesis.

“You’re always asking, ‘What about this feature that doesn’t fit well with our model?’” Lien says. While that can be frustrating at times, she says, “That’s actually part of why I became an astronomer. It’s the unknowns that excite me.”

It would be helpful to observe another similar event, which would give researchers more information as they try to reach agreement on the Cow’s cause. With the number of telescopes rising worldwide and the increasingly collaborative nature of space research, “We are definitely more ready than even ten years ago to spot this kind of phenomenon,” Lien says. “Now we’re just waiting for the next one.”

A paper on the Swift findings, which Lien co-authored and presented at the AAS discussion, has been accepted by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

UMBC’s Colleen Burge helps show oyster aquaculture can limit disease in wild oysters

The potential spread of disease from farmed oysters to wild oysters is a frequent concern for oyster producers and consumers alike. Contrary to common perceptions, new UMBC research in Aquaculture Environment Interactions has found that properly managed oyster aquaculture operations can actually help limit the spread of disease among wild oysters.

“This is another line of evidence saying that oyster aquaculture can be a good thing,” says Colleen Burge, assistant professor of marine biotechnology at UMBC, and a co-author on the study.

“The established way of thinking is that disease spreads from aquaculture, but in fact aquaculture may limit disease in nearby wild populations,” adds Tal Ben-Horin, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rhode Island and the lead author on the study.

Creative conversations

At a workshop funded by the NSF as part of the Ecology of Infectious Marine Disease Research Coordination Network, Burge co-led a session on disease transmission among sea creatures. Prior to the workshop, Ben-Horin began working on mathematical models to examine the interactions between farmed oysters, wild oysters, and the common oyster disease Dermo.

Once at the workshop, Ben-Horin, Burge, and others further explored how best to refine Ben-Horin’s models. “It was exciting to be in the room, talking to experts, bouncing around ideas about different biological systems,” Burge says.

Burge is accustomed to working with researchers from different backgrounds, because her lab is located at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, a facility on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor that houses researchers from UMBC, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and University of Maryland, Baltimore.

One of the results of the NSF-sponsored workshop was her new paper. Burge and colleagues from Rutgers University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science contributed their expertise regarding oyster biology and the ecology of the oysters’ environment, and Ben-Horin used that input to inform the model.

Oyster aquaculture boom a boon?

According to Burge, disease is a major factor in limiting wild oyster populations. Dermo, one of the most prevalent oyster diseases, is caused by a single-celled parasite that occurs naturally in the environment and proliferates in the tissue of host oysters. When infected oysters die, their decaying tissue spreads the parasite to other oysters. But it takes two to three years for the parasite to kill the oysters, and as long as the oysters are harvested before that time, the the spread of the parasite (which is harmless to humans) is limited.

This new research suggests that it’s time to “start thinking about oyster aquaculture as being a sink for disease, rather than a source,” says Burge. She adds that the study “furthers the idea that you can plant a large number of oysters in aquaculture, and it won’t (from a Dermo disease perspective) negatively affect the wild oysters if you harvest them early enough.”

That’s important, because “oyster aquaculture is growing in Maryland right now,” Burge says. In addition, conservation groups are using oyster reef restoration as a tool to improve the Chesapeake Bay’s water quality and ecosystem health overall.

“This paper suggests this growing aquaculture industry could actually support restoration efforts and also the wild fisheries,” Burge says. That is, as long as aquaculturists employ proper management techniques. Oyster farms that grow their product on the bottom surface of the Chesapeake Bay or other bodies of water are unlikely to recover all of their oysters, increasing rather than reducing the spread of the disease, explains Ben-Horin. Growing the oysters in cages or bags above the bottom solves that problem.

It’s all connected

Beyond this new study, Burge’s research more broadly explores how oysters and other bivalves work as some of nature’s most efficient water filters. She examines how they filter out pathogens that affect a range of species. In addition to supporting the current work led by Ben-Horin, she recently received funding to investigate how oysters filter out an eelgrass pathogen from water.

Eelgrass populations have been on the rise in the Bay in recent years, which is a good sign for overall Bay health. “Eelgrass is a foundational species and can provide structure for lots of different animals to live in, including fish, scallops, and other invertebrates,” Burge says. In addition, it’s been shown to moderate the water’s acidity in its immediate vicinity, possibly counteracting the negative effects of ocean acidification.

Eelgrass might even affect oysters and their diseases. “Sometimes ecosystem-level effects are overlooked, but,” Ben-Horin says regarding the new research, “in this case they’re front and center.” He reflects, “Everything that happens in the water is connected.”

All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Three generations, thousands of miles: Scientists unlock the mystery of a dragonfly’s migration

Thanks to photos and films featuring clouds of stunning orange and black monarch butterflies flying across North America, many people today are familiar with how monarchs migrate. The migration patterns of other insects, however, remain more mysterious, for both the public and scientists alike. A new paper in Biology Letters describes a dragonfly’s full life cycle for the first time, in compelling detail.

The researchers explain how the common green darner—a large, abundant dragonfly found across North America—takes three generations to complete its annual cycle. One generation migrates north in spring, the second south in fall, and the third is resident in the southern part of the species’ range over winter. These insects have a wingspan of just 7.5 cm (3 inches), but they migrate an average of over 600 km (373 miles), with some individuals covering more than 2,500 km (1,553 miles).

“We know that a lot of insects migrate, but we have full life history and full migration data for only a couple. This is the first dragonfly in the Western Hemisphere for which we know this,” says Colin Studds, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems at UMBC and senior author on the paper. “We’ve solved the first piece of a big mystery.”

The common green darner is indeed very common, and not currently a threatened species. Understanding their life cycle is important, though, because of the global context. “There are massive insect declines going on around the world,” says Peter Marra, director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and second author on the paper, “so understanding these complex biological phenomena is essential to determine why different populations might be declining.”

Insects are a critical driver of food webs, so figuring out why their populations are falling dramatically is important for the future success of a wide range of species, from rodents to raptors.

The research team used a combination of data sets, including 21 years of citizen science data, more than 800 dragonfly wing specimens from museums going back 140 years, and specimens caught in the wild. Collaborators Kent McFarland and Sara Zahendra of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies spent nearly two years collecting dragonflies from Florida to Ontario, Canada, and working with museums to get permission to analyze their specimens.

The team’s creative analysis included looking at the prevalence of different forms of hydrogen in the dragonflies. The ratio of three forms of hydrogen in the atmosphere shifts with latitude. Dragonflies pick up an imprint of the hydrogen ratio at their birthplace, so a scientist can determine where a dragonfly came from by looking at how much of each hydrogen type is present in a tiny piece of the dragonfly’s wing. That information enabled the team to discern the three-generation migration system.

The citizen science data—information collected by members of the general public—helped the scientists learn what factors cue the dragonflies to migrate or to emerge as flying adults after their aquatic juvenile stage. It turns out temperature plays a big role: the dragonflies both emerge and initiate migration at around 9 degrees Celsius (48 degrees Fahrenheit).

“With climate change we could see dragonflies migrating north earlier and staying later in the fall, which could alter their entire biology and life history,” says Michael Hallworth, postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and first author on the paper. Studds adds, “Climate change is a threat to all kinds of migration systems, and this could be one of them.”

Studds emphasizes that this discovery is the beginning of a long path toward better understanding insect migrations. Revealing the three-generation process, with two migratory generations and one resident, was, itself, “remarkable,” he says. “How it actually happens is a tremendous new mystery that brings together ecology and evolution,” Studds reflects, “and there’s a lot more to understand.”

Image: A common green darner in flight. Photo by Mark Chappell.

From lab to museum, new UMBC grads show the powerful impact of original research

“I just had this feeling that there had to be more to this story,” says Nicolle “Niki” Konkel ’18, on the striking lack of women in her art history textbooks. So, with the support of faculty mentors, in her senior year she embarked on research that has opened new doors in the art world.

Student passion guided by faculty support is part of the fabric of UMBC. Konkel’s experience is one exciting example of how this winning combination can make possible big breakthroughs.

Hearing marginalized voices

Konkel is an art history and museum studies major who came to UMBC after attending Frederick Community College. While at FCC, She worked 30 hours a week in addition to her studies to fund her first trip to the Netherlands, a voyage that shaped her career goals. Now, she is contributing to a new branch of art history research on women of the De Stijl, an early 20th-century avant garde Dutch art movement.

“There’s so much still to learn, and that fuels my passion to go to graduate school and continue this research,” she says. “When marginalized voices can be heard and placed more within the mainstream, I think that’s so important.”

DE STIJL “6 decades book.” Photo by de stijl, CC BY 2.0.

This fall, Konkel was also able to gain professional experience as an curatorial intern at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. She was part of the curatorial team for an entertainment exhibit that will be on display for two decades.

Konkel says the support of her mentors helped make it all possible, especially her senior thesis mentor, visual arts professor Kathy O’Dell. All of the professors “are so invested in us here. They care a lot about my growth and what I’m going to do afterward,” Konkel says. “They want to help you channel your passion.”

Confidence boost

Alexis Waller ’18, biological sciences, has had similarly powerful experiences with research and mentorship. UMBC STEM BUILD, an NIH-funded initiative to increase diversity in the biomedical workforce, “showed me what research actually was,” Waller says. Before UMBC, she shares, “I’d never been inside a lab.” Now? “I just love being in the lab setting and doing hands-on research.”

In her first year, Waller presented at the UMBC Undergraduate Research Symposium with BUILD. With support from Laura Ott, the active learning coordinator for STEM BUILD, Waller joined Michael Summers’s lab in 2016. The lab’s research focuses on how the HIV-1 retrovirus assembles copies of itself within infected cells, so that the copies can emerge to infect other cells.

In addition to Summers, postdoc Pengfei Ding provides direct research mentorship to Waller. “He has always been very patient and encouraged me to ask questions,” Waller says.

Alexis Waller ’18, right, and her mentor Pengfei Ding at work in Michael Summers’s biochemistry lab. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Waller started out in a shadowing role in the lab, but says, “as I’ve gotten more confident and knowledgeable, the more responsibility I’ve been given.”

Now a MARC U*STAR Scholar, Waller is continuing work on her team’s project studying a step in the replication of HIV. By contributing to a better understanding of that step, she’s helping provide the knowledge necessary for other scientists to develop treatments to block HIV replication, preventing spread of the infection.

After graduation, Waller will continue to work in the Summers lab as a research assistant while she applies to Ph.D. programs in microbiology. “Being a part of BUILD and MARC, and working in the Summers lab, has all led to me deciding to pursue a Ph.D.,” she says.

Bench to bedside

Like Waller, Abby Cruz ‘18 is also a biological sciences major and a MARC U*STAR Scholar. When she came to UMBC, she believed science was a solitary pursuit, but that changed after she joined Fernando Vonhoff’s biology lab. “I look forward to going to lab because of the collaboration with other people,” she says.

Two researchers examining a lab notebook

Abby Cruz ’18, left, and her mentor Fernando Vonhoff discuss an experimental protocol. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Cruz has been looking at whether certain genes may be associated with human motor neuron diseases, such as ALS, using fruit flies as a model. Scientists at Yale University will use her results to inform their study of motor neuron disease in human cells.

She also works part time in a neurology clinic, where she interacts directly with patients. “I love it,” she says. “It’s what gets me up every day—that I’m part of a community where I can see the research and the clinical side go hand in hand.”

Cruz reached out to Vonhoff just before she joined UMBC from Howard Community College in 2016, and he’s been a supporter ever since. “If it wasn’t for Dr. Vonhoff I wouldn’t have been able to do everything I did,” she says. “If you’re willing to try and put in the effort, his attitude is, ‘Let’s make it happen.’”

Abby Cruz ’18 and her mentor Fernando Vonhoff check on a vial of fruit flies, their study organism. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Before starting work in the lab, Cruz was planning on medical school. Now she’s looking toward an M.D./Ph.D. or D.O./Ph.D. (doctor of osteopathic medicine). “Focusing on that connection between the research and the clinic has really solidified my future goals,” she says.

Bridging cultures

When Julian Tash ’18 approached Constantine Vaporis, history professor and former director of UMBC’s Asian studies program, after an art history class one day, he expected a helpful conversation about his career goals. He came away with a game-changing connection to Robert Mintz, the curator of Japanese art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Tash, a Humanities Scholar, had noticed Asian art was given less attention than Western art in his high school courses. His further exposure at UMBC to the rich traditions found in Asian art, however, inspired him to pursue a double major in Asian studies and history. With Vaporis’s support, he began an internship at the Walters.

Cataloguing Buddhist statuary at the Walters got Tash “interested in the question of how to connect museum visitors with these statues, when they don’t have a background in the culture in which the objects were produced,” he shares. That interest led to a project he pursued with guidance from Vaporis and visual arts professor Preminda Jacob.

Julian Tash ’18 says most of his research, when he isn’t doing fieldwork, involves a lot of reading in the library. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Tash received funding from a UMBC Undergraduate Research Award and a Bridging Scholarship from the American Association of Teachers of Japanese to travel throughout Japan and in the U.S. to explore how Buddhist statues are displayed in their native context compared to in American museums. His resulting research paper, which has been selected for publication in the UMBC Review, recommends that U.S. museums use technology to help visitors see more clearly how the statues appear in their original contexts, in Japanese temples.

Tash has already shared his research with curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, British Museum, and Freer and Sackler Galleries. He has also presented other work at the Bard Conference on Asia and the Environment, with research partner Jennifer Christhilf ’19, geography and environmental systems. That project was a new direction for Tash, exploring the impacts of dam construction projects in China and downstream countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia.

Julian Tash ’18 and one of his mentors, Julie Rosenthal, stand by his research poster about dam removals on the Mekong River in China. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

“Working with someone in the sciences is really emblematic of UMBC, because we’re bringing it all together, in a way that’s vitally important to this region,” says Tash. “That was a great experience and it got me thinking about the intersection of the humanities and policy.”

Although he’s graduating, collaborations Tash has helped build will continue at UMBC, including a Perspectives on Asia conference that will be co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins University.

Tash has applied for a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in Taiwan as well as graduate programs.

Like Konkel, Cruz, and Waller, when Tash reflects on his UMBC experience, it all comes back to mentorship and support. “Even though these professors all have really busy schedules, I would go to them with an idea, and even if it wasn’t in their immediate area of study, they all made such phenomenal efforts to support me,” he shares.

“UMBC put the resources in front of me,” Tash says. “I just thought, I could do all these things—I just have to try to pursue them.”

December commencement ceremonies will be livestreamed through both the UMBC Commencement website and UMBC Facebook page. Share well wishes for our grads using #UMBCgrad and #UMBCproud.

Banner image: Alexis Waller ’18 and her mentor, Pengfei Ding, at work in the lab. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC launches PROMISE Academy with USM partners, to support diverse faculty in the biomedical sciences

UMBC is one of a handful of universities across the country to receive new funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a specialized program to support faculty diversity in the biomedical sciences.

The new initiative, the PROMISE Academy, is an extension of Maryland’s nationally-regarded PROMISE AGEP program, which UMBC co-leads with University of Maryland, College Park and University of Maryland, Baltimore. The Promise Academy serves all schools within the University System of Maryland. The legacy PROMISE AGEP initiative offers community, academic and emotional support, and professional development opportunities to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty across the state.

The new PROMISE Academy is officially titled, “The AGEP Alliance State System Model to Transform the Hiring Practices and Career Success of Tenure Track Historically Underrepresented Minority Faculty in Biomedical Sciences.” This new AGEP will draw on the expertise of universities around the nation and evidence-based best practices to recruit and retain a diverse group of faculty members in STEM fields.

UMBC’s partners in this work include the University of Maryland, College Park; University of Maryland, Baltimore; Towson University; and Salisbury University. The PROMISE Academy joins other new, faculty-focused NSF-funded Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) programs based at UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Tuskegee University, and Stony Brook University.

On November 27, leaders from the Maryland partner institutions and other universities around the country met for the PROMISE Academy Inaugural Leadership Meeting. The meeting was held at the Universities at Shady Grove, a consortium of University System of Maryland (USM) institutions located in Montgomery County.

“The PROMISE Academy represents the best of what our institutions can do collectively to enhance the power of the broader University System of Maryland,” said JoAnn Boughman, senior vice chancellor for academic and student affairs at USM. “It is gratifying to maximize the power of what we like to call ‘system-ness’ in working toward such an important goal in STEM education.”

At the meeting, Provost Philip Rous and Dean Bill LaCourse presented the Natural Sciences Pre-professoriate Fellowship Program in UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, an example of the type of initiative the AGEP encourages. The program offers postdoctoral fellows an appointment of up to two years, during which they receive support in preparing for tenure-track assistant professor positions at UMBC. In addition to being strong scholars, the applicants must be committed to diversity in higher education.

Renetta Garrison Tull is an international leader in STEM diversity who kicked off the inaugural meeting. Tull is associate vice provost of strategic initiatives at UMBC and USM’s director of graduate and professional pipeline development.

“With so many top programs supporting the success of diverse students and faculty, UMBC has a strong foundation on which to build. We are proud to collaborate with our USM alliance partners in this system-wide endeavor,” Tull said.

She looks forward to working with colleagues “to develop, implement, study, evaluate, and disseminate models for faculty diversity that can be replicated and scaled by other institutions nationwide.”

Banner image: UMBC’s Biological Sciences Building and Library Pond. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Meet UMBC’s Linda Wiratan, Rhodes Scholar finalist

UMBC is celebrating the Rhodes Trust’s recognition of Linda Wiratan ’19, biochemistry and molecular biology, as a Rhodes Scholar finalist. This honor comes just one year after Naomi Mburu ’18, chemical engineering, became UMBC’s first-ever Rhodes Scholar. The Rhodes Trust announced the winners on Saturday, November 17, after an intensive application and interview process. Wiratan was one of fourteen finalists in the Washington, DC district, which draws students from Maryland, Delaware, and Washington.

The Rhodes Scholarship is unique, because it selects students “not only for their outstanding scholarly achievements, but for their character, commitment to others and to the common good, and for their potential for leadership in whatever domains their careers may lead.”

Wiratan, who is also a Goldwater Scholar and a member of the UMBC Honors College, exemplifies these values in her roles as a researcher, student leader, and socially-conscious entrepreneur who blends science and the arts.

Research and outreach

Wiratan began her research career as a high school student in Marcin Ptaszek’s organic chemistry lab, working closely with graduate student Nopondo Esemoto ‘12, biochemistry and molecular biology, and postdoc Joshua Akhigbe, whom she counts among her most ardent supporters and mentors.

She has spent the last two years conducting research on plant immunity with Hua Lu and postdocs Chong Zhang and Min Gao, funded by two Undergraduate Research Awards. This summer she worked with molecular and cellular biology professor Craig Hunter and postdoc Andrey Shubin at Harvard University on a mammalian cell biology project. Wiratan, who also has a creative writing minor, has also written about her research for The Conversation, and been an author on four academic journal articles.

Wiratan holds a firm belief that society benefits when the general public has an opportunity to better understand science. As a first-year student, she joined UMBC’s chapter of the American Chemical Society, a group with a mission to promote chemistry education and the public appreciation of chemistry. The chapter organizes outreach events with elementary and middle school students in the local community. As a senior, Wiratan now serves as its president.

Through her business, City of Cells, Wiratan also blends science, the arts, and a public education mission to share her love of science with others. She produces animations to explain scientific concepts and sews toys designed to look like cells—when unzipped, the organelles come spilling out.

Unshakeable resolution

Though still early in her scientific training and career, Wiratan has already made significant contributions to her community and to society through her scientific and creative work, and the challenges she has tackled along the way reveal her tremendous dedication, determination, and persistence. Wiratan began a struggle with severe depression as a young adult, prior to entering UMBC. Once at the university, she was focused on completing her degree, and she expected to travel an anonymous path toward that goal, but that changed when she connected with the Honors College.

Simon Stacey, director of the Honors College, reached out to Wiratan during her first year, after hearing about her from an Honors College advisor. He encouraged her to stay in touch.

“If I had not had that conversation in the first semester of freshman year, I would not be where I am today,” reflects Wiratan, who names Stacey among her strongest supporters and mentors.

Wiratan has continued to face challenges throughout her time at UMBC, any one of which could have derailed her dreams of becoming a scientist. Throughout college, she has faced depression, social anxiety, and the increasing risk of breast cancer. Abruptly during her third year, she had to begin independently supporting herself, which came with pressure to balance spending on food, housing, education, and medical needs. And through all of these life-changing events and more, she has persevered.

“My overwhelming impression of Linda is of unstoppable, unshakeable resolution,” says Stacey. “She was just never going to give up.”

Wiratan created a comprehensive budget. She found new ways to manage her practical and personal needs. And through it all, Stacey says, “she kept going to class, kept submitting work, kept doing her research, and kept applying for and taking advantage of opportunities.”

Shifting science culture

As she progresses through her emerging career in science, Wiratan also wants to bring broader awareness to the intersection of mental illness and academia, to decrease stigma and increase support for people experiencing depression, anxiety, and other challenges. As a start, she created a group on the Goldwater Scholars online forum to discuss these issues, and she intends to make this one focus of her work moving forward.

“Mental illness is something society needs to address at the graduate school level, because graduate students are six times more likely to have depression or anxiety than the general public,” Wiratan notes. “I think that’s a big issue.”

She’d also like to increase an appreciation of scientists as whole people. “For people who have interests in fields other than science, such as art,” she says, “I would like science mentors not to see that as a disadvantage or a weakness or a sign of not being committed to your field.” Rather, she hopes scientists can value each other for all their contributions to the world, scientific and otherwise, and be encouraged to incorporate those other skills into their research when appropriate.

Wiratan is a self-identified introvert who was once hesitant to lead, but that’s changing. In a world where extroverts are often identified for leadership roles, “I think as an introvert I could inspire other people who might feel disadvantaged because they have a quiet temperament, or maybe they just don’t know how to walk into a room full of strangers and start a conversation.”

Rather than a boisterous personality, it’s her core values and grit that set Wiratan apart. “She is a thoroughly decent and humane person—kind, generous, deeply humble,” says Stacey. “She has a capacity for authentic sympathy that I can only imagine has been reinforced by her own experiences, and a quiet and self-reflective wisdom.”

A bright future

Wiratan’s experience as a Goldwater Scholar and the support of her mentors throughout her UMBC career have boosted her confidence. “It confirmed to me that I’m headed in the right direction with the choices I make,” she says. “I’ve taken a lot of risks as an undergraduate that I would never have taken if my mentors hadn’t told me to just try—the worst that happens is you fail and then you move on.”

“Being a Rhodes finalist tells me that I can combine all of these things—my passion for cell biology research, my interest in educating the public, and also my promotion of mental illness discussion within academia—and have a really unique, rewarding career,” Wiratan says.

“I could not more firmly believe that Linda is destined for great things,” Stacey says. “There’s clearly a stellar academic future for her, and she will be a wonderful teacher and mentor. I am also certain she will make a real contribution to helping the public understand the value of science and scientists.”

Wiratan is excited for what lies ahead. “My mentors have become like a family to me,” she says. “I didn’t always think I could make it this far, but I did.”

Banner images: Linda Wiratan in Hua Lu’s lab, where she works with Arabidopsis thaliana, a common model species used in plant research. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Student scientists take center stage at UMBC’s largest-ever Undergraduate Research Symposium

The College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS) hosted its 21st Undergraduate Research Symposium (URS) in the Chemical and Biological Sciences this fall. The event has been growing steadily, and this year set new records: Students presented nearly 300 projects and more than 200 additional guests attended.

“It is so inspiring to see hundreds of undergraduate researchers from over 40 colleges and universities and nearly a dozen states coming together to present research to fellow students, mentors, and faculty judges,” shares Dean Bill LaCourse of CNMS. “Being able to communicate one’s research in a clear, concise, and defensible manner is a critical skill. I wish everyone had the opportunity to feel the students’ energy and excitement, as many presented for the first time.”

Aleem Mohamed ‘19, biological sciences, and a member of the STEM BUILD Training Program, presented at URS for the first time in 2016. This year, he and his research partner Ilzat Ali ‘19, biochemistry, won first place in their judging group. Mohamed and Ali’s research focuses on figuring out how genes in bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacterial cells) affect a close relative of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis.

As HHMI-SEA Undergraduate Researchers, the duo worked with HHMI investigator Viknesh Sivanathan. Their mentor guided them as they got their project started, preparing them to branch out on their own. Mohamed says the experience “has made me develop a love for the research field I didn’t know I had, and has made me want to do research in my career.”

Joanna Lum ‘19, biological sciences, presented work she completed during a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and earned second place in her judging group. Lum investigated pathways that regulate viruses that may be involved in initiating cancer.

Gaining early exposure to research and receiving substantial mentoring from a community of scholars through the BUILD program have helped Lum find her way, she explains. Because of that support, “not only am I able to overcome many obstacles in the classroom and in the STEM field, I am also able grow in confidence and see myself as a scientist,” she says.

Lum’s experience with BUILD helped prepare her to apply for other programs, and now she is also a MARC U*STAR Scholar.

The URS event, and the work students do on their way to presenting there, can be a gateway to further research and other accomplishments. The day itself also serves as a stepping stone. Fernando Vonhoff, a pre-professoriate fellow in biological sciences, addressed the students prior to announcing the award winners at the end of the day.

“You are a better scientist now than you were yesterday,” Vonhoff told the students. Award or not, “Science is about the process, rather than the final outcome. Participating in this event and being exposed to so much good science during the whole day has been part of your process.”

“I am confident that this event will have a lasting and positive impact on all those that participated,” added Dean LaCourse, “and UMBC and the college are proud to sponsor this symposium in support of our future scientists.”

Image: Fall on campus. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Bahama Oriole Project team awarded NSF grant to offer more UMBC undergrads international research experiences

UMBC is recognized as a national leader in undergraduate teaching, in part because the university connects so many students with meaningful research opportunities. Now, a new $300,000 NSF International Research Experiences for Students grant will enable one team of UMBC faculty across three departments to offer research and cross-cultural learning experiences to even more students.

Kevin Omland, professor of biological sciences and the lead on the new grant, sees student research as essential to science, and both undergraduate and graduate students have played a major role in his international field research for decades. Many students have gotten involved through the Bahama Oriole Project, a collaborative initiative with Bahamian scientists and conservationists to save the critically endangered Bahama Oriole.

The project began in 2016 and has taken eight students to the Bahamas for research so far. “It’s a great opportunity for students to make a huge impact,” Omland says. “The students have already made many key contributions.”

International advantage

Matthew Kane ’19, biological sciences, has been to the Bahamas twice with Omland. Before his first trip, he’d never been on a plane. “My third flight was a rough charter to Andros Island,” Kane says. On the most recent trip, he collected data to measure rat populations on the island. The rats are known to consume oriole eggs, and Kane wants to figure out how severe a threat they are to oriole populations.

Kane selected and ordered peanut butter-scented wax baits, worked with other students to set them out in strategic locations, and then regularly checked them for tell-tale bite marks indicating the presence of rats. Being a star on UMBC’s cross country team certainly helped as he traipsed miles through the dry pine forest, day after day.

“Being on the Bahama Oriole Project was my first hands-on glimpse at international research,” Kane says. “It was the first time I had seen scientists from two different countries collaborating on a conservation project on this scale.” The relationships Omland has developed with local scientists and the Bahamas National Trust are huge assets in the work to save the Bahama Oriole, and in creating a memorable student experience.

Traveling to the Bahamas and developing his own relationships with Bahamian scientists “showed me how important it is to have these diverse perspectives in projects like this,” Kane says, “because having the expertise of the Bahamas National Trust as well as this lab is giving the project a much bigger boost than if only one or the other was working on it.”

Creating opportunities

This is exactly the kind of reflection Omland and his UMBC colleagues on the grant—Matthew Fagan, Jane Arnold Lincove, and Colin Studds—hope to hear from students. Through the project, “students can get a sense of endangered species, and climate change, and some of the challenges that are unique to island species, but it’s also an amazing cultural opportunity for them,” Omland says.

“It’s like a combination of being an exchange student and being a researcher,” adds Lincove, associate professor of public policy. Many of the students who participate may have had limited opportunities to travel previously, adding to the experience’s impact.

“UMBC is a younger school with lots of recent immigrants, first-generation college students, and underrepresented minority students who might not have had a chance to go to summer camp in the Rockies or go to France with their parents to see museums,” says Omland. “This project provides an amazing opportunity for these students.”

Interdisciplinary efforts

On top of that, “the students from different disciplines are going to have to learn how to communicate with each other,” says Fagan, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems. The project includes students studying biology, geography, and statistics, and Omland is open to recruiting students from other relevant fields. The diversity of expertise will allow the group “to tackle a real diversity of problems,” Fagan adds.

In addition to Kane’s predator work, Fagan will help students make detailed habitat maps of the island. The mapping work will include boots-on-the-ground fieldwork as well as take advantage of “fun 21st century technologies” like remote sensing, Fagan explains. It could help the team investigate how fire affects the island’s ecosystems or predict how sea level rise may change the availability of habitat for the orioles and other species.

Studds, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems, has been working with a student to improve population estimates for the Bahama Oriole using cutting-edge statistical techniques. He’ll also look at predator populations.

Looking to the future

Lincove has a different role to play. She and her graduate students will evaluate the project, so the researchers “can think about what they want to do in the next year and if it’s meeting their goals for what they want the students to get out of it.”

Lincove’s team will interview the students several times, up until graduation and potentially beyond. They’ll be looking at whether research in the Bahamas influenced the students’ career paths, academic performance at UMBC, and other outcomes. Because of the international factor, her team will also look at whether the experience changes how students think about other cultures.

The results will be helpful for the Bahama Oriole team in planning future student research trips, and the experience will also be valuable for Lincove’s policy students. “I’m trying to give our students hands-on evaluation work to do,” she says. Working directly with UMBC faculty and students rather than being handed a gigantic database by a distant corporation, she explains, “makes it a better learning experience for my students.”

Overall, “a major goal of the grant is to increase the diversity of students and researchers interested in and working on environmental science and ecology conservation projects,” Omland says. This might sound like a lofty goal, but he feels confident that UMBC is well-positioned to make this vision a reality, and to keep producing high-quality, high-impact science along the way.

Banner image: Omland, Michael Rowley ’18, Cierra Mckoy ’20, and Yancy set up a mist net that temporarily captures birds for data collection. Photo by Matthew Kane ’19.

New UMBC research suggests need to rethink goals of global reforestation efforts

Many countries have made commitments to restore huge areas of forest as part of the Bonn Challenge, organized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. For example, Costa Rica has promised to preserve 1 million hectares (3,861 square miles) of forest by 2020—about 20 percent of the nation’s total area. However, a new paper in Conservation Letters suggests that quickly reforesting large areas may not be the best strategy to yield many of the benefits forests can provide.

Forests store carbon, clean water, prevent soil erosion, and provide habitat for a wide range of species, “but all those benefits start kicking in when forests are older,” says Matthew Fagan, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems at UMBC and second author on the paper. That’s why the new paper’s findings were alarming: By analyzing a massive data set spanning 1947 – 2014, the authors found that in Costa Rica, 50 percent of secondary forest patches were re-cleared within 20 years, and 85 percent were re-cleared within 54 years.

A long-term commitment

“Young forests take something like 100 years to get to peak biodiversity, and as many as 80 years to store enough carbon to make a big difference,” Fagan says. “A lot of these benefits accumulate over time, and they don’t accrue linearly,” he adds, so a 100-year-old forest is more than ten times as beneficial as a 10-year-old forest.

Committing to preserve a huge number of hectares of forest by 2020 might be appealing to a government trying to make a statement, but “for every 100 hectares restored in 2020, 20 years later they’re going to have 50, and 50 years later they’re only going to have 15,” Fagan says.

Lead study author Leighton Reid, an assistant scientist at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development, says that he would prefer to see countries “commit to restore an area of 100-year-old forest by 2120.” He added, “What I hope is that this research is going to lead to countries taking a more long-term view of their restoration commitments.”

Green highways

The good news is that the study found certain types of forest patches were less likely to be re-cleared, particularly larger patches and those alongside rivers. That’s critical, because as research partner Joshua Slaughter ’22, computer engineering, explains, previous research has found that “patches just 30 feet across can serve as highways for rare endangered bird species to travel through the landscape.” By teasing apart the relationships between external factors and the likelihood of a patch to persist, Slaughter hopes the team’s work will inform new, targeted restoration policies.

“As long as these forests are being protected, it can help prevent extinction of endangered species,” Slaughter says. “And being directly related to something as big as that has a huge impact on me and why I want to continue pursuing research.”

Slaughter has been working with Fagan since his junior year of high school, and is now a first-year student at UMBC and an author on the new paper. The project brings his interests together seamlessly.

“I want to incorporate my passion for geography with my passion for coding and making devices, so GIS [geographic information systems] is the middle ground where I can reach both fields without dedicating myself to just one,” says Slaughter. He plans to pursue a Ph.D. and then a research career combining computer engineering, environmental systems, and GIS.

Taking a closer look

Overall, “all of our hopes and needs for secondary forests rely on them getting old, and what this study shows is that they aren’t,” Reid says. His main hope for this study is that it will lead to “people, and in particular, national governments, taking more seriously the problems of ensuring that restoration projects persist into the future.”

“We want a world with more forests—where soil isn’t eroding off hillsides, and where trees take carbon dioxide out of the air to help limit climate change. We want to see people drinking clean water and breathing clean air, and secondary forests are seen as a major way to get to that,” Fagan says. “The tropics have been deforested for decades, and now they’re starting to regrow. It’s a really big positive story, but we need to take a closer look.”

Banner image: Matthew Fagan (left) and Joshua Slaughter. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Twenty years of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study: An icon of urban ecology research

The Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) is one of only two urban Long-Term Ecological Research projects initially funded by the National Science Foundation, and this year it turns 20. When the BES was founded in 1998, “The field of urban ecology basically didn’t exist,” says Claire Welty, director of UMBC’s Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education. Since then, the field has flourished, in no small part thanks to dedicated researchers in Baltimore.

The BES has succeeded in compiling massive datasets on the Baltimore region’s watershed, ecology, and sociological issues related to the environment. The extent of these data are unparalleled anywhere else in the world. That makes the study “an international icon,” Welty says, and its wealth of fully public data provides “a rich resource for people to use in their research.”

“We’re living in a rapidly changing environment,” says Andy Miller, professor of geography and environmental systems (GES) and chair of the department when the study was founded. The long-term data the BES collects allows researchers to document “how systems change in response to what we do” on and to the landscape, Miller explains. That includes large-scale development of previously undisturbed ecosystems. If we can learn enough, Miller says, that knowledge may create “opportunities to mitigate the effects of urbanization.”

Moving on those opportunities requires collaboration with policymakers at many levels. Over the course of the BES, its researchers have gained the trust of local and state officials who have found BES data helpful in informing policy discussions, says Miller. Employees from the Maryland Department of the Environment, Department of Natural Resources, and others regularly attend BES quarterly meetings.

At the federal level, scientists and managers from the USDA Forest Service’s Baltimore Field Station and from the US Geological Survey’s MD-DE-DC Water Science Center have been long-term partners, contributing to and benefiting from the BES program. Both are located at the bwtech@UMBC Research & Technology Park.

Beyond the flood of data and influence on policy, “The impact of the BES on research infrastructure and training in Baltimore has been so important,” says Miller. The BES is headquartered on UMBC’s campus, and the presence of the program here has helped faculty successfully apply for funding to support related projects. It even enabled the launch of UMBC’s graduate program in GES by facilitating funding of the program’s first students through the NSF’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program.

The education component of the BES extends far beyond the graduate level. Its education arm works with K-12 students throughout the Baltimore region to teach them about their local ecosystems and the importance of caring for the environment, with the goal of raising a generation of young people committed to environmental stewardship.

Today, “More than half of the world’s population lives in cities,” says Chris Swan, professor of GES and a BES scientist, “and understanding how these environments function from the natural, physical and social science perspectives has never been more important.”

Plus, the effects of climate change don’t necessarily show up immediately, but can accumulate over time, explains Welty, “so it’s important that the data collection continue,” especially as climate change accelerates.

The BES is unique because it “brings scientists, stakeholders, policy makers, and students to the table on a regular basis to perform research, interpret results and understand outcomes,” says Swan. This level of collaboration on such a large scale enables BES to have a substantial impact, locally and in other urban areas around the world. This impact can be felt in the well-being of urban residents, he adds, “none more so than the people of Baltimore.”

Banner image: Chris Swan tends native plants at a UMBC greenhouse. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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